Shakespeare, Othello

Othello holds a unique place in my heart. It was the only one of the Big Four tragedies (Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth being the others) that we didn’t read in high school, and when I read it in college, it instantly became my favorite. The longer I thought about it, the more subtleties it seemed to possess. The paper I wrote on it was the first paper that I felt happy with, a paper that, funnily enough, more or less landed me the job I currently hold. The character of Iago, especially, was a character unlike any other; he became my touchstone for how the greatest writer in the English language conceived of evil.

Rereading the play after so many other wonderful works by Shakespeare has been somewhat mixed, in the way that returning to anything that has been enlarged by imagination and reminiscence is. Iago’s evil does not appear as earth-shattering now in light of, say, Blood Meridian’s lengthy disquisitions. At the same time, reading Shakespeare is nothing if not profitable, and the insights I gained in previous readings, less important to me now, have brought forth ideas more nuanced, fresh, and complex.

The Banality of Evil

As Shakespeare chooses to do, let us dive into our discussion of the play by beginning with Iago, easily one of my favorite Shakespearean inventions. There is ample evidence of his role as villain, from his inversion of God’s “I am that I am” into “I am not what I am,” to the contrast between his and Othello’s skin tones (switching the traditional light/dark opposition). Yet what frustrated me when I read the play in college was why Shakespeare chose to give such an obviously evil character—easily the most “obvious” of the evils we’ve encountered so far, I’d argue—why he would be given such reasonable speeches. I’ve commented on this before, referencing the deceptive nature of evil in Edward Norton’s performance in American History X, and I would still contend that evil is most effective under the guise of reasonableness, but we can say more than this.

The first thing to add is that Iago performs some of the same functions in the play that Falstaff performed in the Henriad. Consider these two passages, the first from Falstaff:

“Well, ‘tis no matter; honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. What is honor? A word. What is that word honor? Air – a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis an insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it.” 

And the second from Iago:

 “As I am an honest man, I had thought you had received some bodily wound. There is more sense in that than in reputation. Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. You have lost no reputation at all unless you repute yourself such a loser.”

Certainly there is a difference in the pitch and quality of these speeches, but the sense is very similar: ideals like honor or reputation are not real things, the way that bodily harm is. Harold Bloom writes that Othello is one of only two plays that “exclude all laughter, as if to protect [Othello] from the Falstaffian perspective.” We will talk about laughter later, but we notice that Falstaff’s words rely on being taken as humorous to be so characteristically Falstaffian. When he speaks them, it is as if he is casting off shackles that had been binding him and, by extension, us. When Iago speaks them, we feel a similar lightness, only to find that we have been trapped in another way. (I am reminded here of Kafka’s “A Fable” and David Foster Wallace’s commentary on it; as I wrote the preceding paragraph, I ended up at the same conclusion that he came to seemingly by chance, though that can hardly be the case.)

This is to say that when Bloom writes that “only humor could defend against Iago,” it is like saying “only being happy can defend against being sad”: it is cold comfort when the world is bereft of happiness. Which returns me to my original question: why does Iago get the powerful rational speeches? I would answer: For the same reason that Kafka’s sense of unease is accompanied by the sound of logic; for the same reason that Hamlet’s speeches are philosophical and Angelo’s judgments do not yield to Isabella’s pleas: in all, there is a denial of life, a dependence on the mechanistic grinding of logic’s gears, and a sense of being closed off from any possibility that you are not driven to through labyrinthine reasoning. Iago is “a fecund abyss,” Bloom writes, capturing both the endlessness of his lies and the bottomlessness of his inhumanity. This point is emphasized by Wilson Knight, who contrasts Othello’s high-minded language (we will discuss this momentarily) with Iago’s:

“Iago works at the foundations of human values. Cassio is a soldier: he ruins him as a soldier, makes him drunk. So he ruins both Othello’s love and warrior-heart. He makes him absurd, ugly… It is a formless, colourless essence, insidiously undermining a world of concrete, visual, richly-toned forms. That is the Iago-spirit embattled against the domesticity, the romance, the idealized humanity of the Othello world.”

Iago’s world is colorless (similar to, yet unlike, Othello's black-and-white world), formless; it is the epitome of nonbeing.

A Man’s Man

Which is not to say that Othello plays no part in his own downfall. He is complicit insofar as he allows his self to be identified with his accidents: “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly.” He has planted his own garden, in Iago’s vernacular, and he shall reap what he sows. This is not a new thought, and it’s a variation of what I argued in that paper I wrote several years ago. There are other considerations, however, which are newer to me than this, so rather than retreading old ground, let us look for other explanations of Othello’s tragedy.

Othello as a character is about as grand as Shakespearean heroes come, and grandness is not easy to write. Yet even without seeing the play performed, one can understand the sort of man Othello is. Consider these lines, and then consider what Wilson Knight has to say:

“Nay, had she been true, / If Heaven would make me such another world / Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, / I’d not have sold her for it.”

And Wilson Knight:

“Notice the single word ‘chrysolite’ with its outstanding and remote beauty: this is typical of Othello. The effect in such passages is primarily one of contrast. The vastness of the night sky, and its moving planets, or the earth itself—here conceived objectively as a solid, round, visualized object—these things, though thrown momentarily into sensible relation with the passions of man, yet remain vast, distant, separate, seen but not apprehended; something against which the dramatic movement may be silhouetted, but with which it cannot be merged. This poetic use of heavenly bodies serves to elevate the theme, to raise issues infinite and unknowable. Those bodies are not, however, implicit symbols of man’s spirit, as in King Lear: they remain distinct, isolated phenomena, sublimely decorative to the play.” 

Decorative is a good word, but it gives Othello’s diction a sort of frivolity which detracts from its pathos. It would be better to say, as Wilson Knight does later, that these images injected into otherwise plain passages bring value to “the human passion which cries out to them.” Othello’s speech is like Othello himself: a master of the civilized world who still knows how to regale his admirers with fantastical tales. “The final result makes us forget the emotion in contemplation of the image. Beauty has been imposed on human sorrow, rather than shown to be intrinsic therein.”

A Small World

Othello’s way of speaking reflects a way of looking at the world. When we talked about Hamlet last time, we mentioned how the play problematized the idea of the afterlife, to the point that the notion of life after death felt limiting, claustrophobic, rather than freeing. In pointing out the uses of Othello’s language, we notice that he, too, may feel claustrophobia, limited by his self-conception and his conception of his life and love.

First, consider this discussion between Emilia and Desdemona on the topic of adultery:

Desdemona: “Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?”

Emilia: “The world’s a huge thing; it is a great price for a small vice.”

Desdemona: “In troth, I think thou wouldst not.”

Emilia: “In troth, I think I should; and undo’t when I had done. Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any pretty exhibition; but, for all the whole world – ‘Ud’s pity! who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch? I should venture purgatory for’t.”

Desdemona: “Beshrew me if I would do such a wrong for the whole world.”

Emilia: “Why, the wrong is but a wrong i’ th’ world; and having the world for your labor, ‘tis a wrong in your own world, and you might quickly make it right.”

The comparison to Measure for Measure is obvious. Isabella cannot dream of sleeping with Angelo for Claudio because “more than our brother is our chastity,” and Desdemona can’t imagine breaking her wedding vow in order to grant her husband more glory. Yet Emilia, clearly the shrewdest person in the play outside of Iago (which proves to be problematic for him), knows that such an act is not greater than the world: it is “but a wrong i’ th’ world”; in Judge Holden’s words, it is “but a fact among others.” What kind of idiot would not do such a thing?

Well, Othello. Recall the “chrysolite” quote from earlier. Even more than that, consider the words Othello utters after he has killed Desdemona: “Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse / Of sun and moon, and that th’ affrighted globe / Did yawn at alteration.” He dreams that the world should shudder at his sin, but forgets that the sin is but a wrong in the world: it is not the world, and it does not create in the world a sense of obligation, as Stephen Crane would say.

Indeed, Othello often expects his deeds to shake the earth on its very foundations. When he begins to feel jealousy, he says, “Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus.” He looks for vindication in nature, inverting the order of causation. As Desdemona says, “Men’s natures wrangle with inferior things, / Though great ones are their object.”

Who’s There?

I’d like to close this discussion by meditating on an incredible essay by the philosopher Stanley Cavell, called “Othello and the Stake of the Other.” The essay comes from a collection by Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, and I have to say it’s one of the more difficult works I’ve read in recent memory. It reminds me—forgive the odd comparison—of the way Thomas Pynchon writes: it creates in me a feeling of uncertainty, where each phrase may begin in one place and end up somewhere else entirely. His sentences are idiosyncratic, sometimes dense and tortuous, other times fragmented and conversational. I haven’t referenced him much in our discussions of the tragedies, but I will now, and I will also highly recommend reading his essay (not only because it touches on Montaigne, one of my personal favorites).

In his essay, Cavell considers Descartes’ skepticism and how it can help us think about Othello’s strange inclination to believe Iago over his own wife. One could say that Descartes’ project was to confirm the belief that a person other than myself is a human being like, but different than, myself; that the beings I see from my window are people and not just cleverly disguised robots; that “the knowledge of a human self by a human self,” to quote Cavell, is possible. Upon this fact “the integrity of my (human, finite) existence may depend.” And in Othello, Cavell finds the epitome of man’s struggle against skepticism.

The demon of skepticism, of course, is Iago, injecting his topsy-turvy view of the world into Othello’s less-than-Stoic heart. Yet it is not that Iago convinces Othello against the latter’s better judgment. From Cavell:

“It is not conceivable that Othello believes Iago and not Desdemona. Iago, we might say, offers Othello an opportunity to believe something, something to oppose something else he knows.”

Iago does not wrench the belief in Desdemona’s faithfulness from the iron jaws of Othello’s heart. I would not even say that Iago poisons Othello with words. If Othello the play is about the fragility of love, as the introduction puts it, Iago needs only to introduce the idea into the realm of possibility. One would not think of a pink elephant unprompted; but if I said “Don’t think about a pink elephant,” it’s all you can do. So it is with love. Such a powerful emotion, made all the more powerful by Othello’s (and yes, Desdemona’s too) absolutism, that “To be once in doubt / Is to be once resolved,” could not withstand a simple suggestion: for Othello and Desdemona alike, it’s all or nothing. Cavell writes:

“But then this is what I have throughout kept arriving at as the cause of skepticism – the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle. (To interpret ‘a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack.’)”

There’s more to think about here than can be put down easily in this post. At its heart, though, is Othello’s inability to bend the way Iago can, to mold himself to the situation. When uncertainty appears, it is taken for a threat, a problem that must be solved. It is very possible that I am interpreting his words incorrectly, but as I understand it, interpreting “a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack” suggests that Othello is incapable of understanding, as Descartes found in his project, the supreme difficulty of proving in an exhaustive sense the existence of another person; Descartes had to posit no less than God Himself in order to do it. We are human, bound to uncertainty; it is a result of our finitude, not evidence of our flaws. Cavell again:

“All these topics should be food for thought and moderation, not for torture and murder as fit for rue and laughter as for pity and terror; they are not tragic unless one makes them so, takes them so; that we are tragic in what we take to be tragic; that one must take one’s imperfections with a ‘gay and sociable wisdom’ [quoting Montaigne], not with a somber and isolating eloquence.”

But we’ve learned from Wilson Knight that Othello cannot help but be eloquent, somberly or otherwise. He continues:

“It is advice to accept one’s humanity, and one can almost see Iago as the slanderer of human nature (this would be his diabolism) braced with Othello as the enacter of the slander – the one thinking to escape human nature from below, the other from above.”

We recall Rosalind from As You Like It, who must be the exalter of human nature if Iago is its slanderer. Love, according to her, is a vitalizing force, and to think it brings chaos, as Othello does, is flat-out wrong. One can imagine Othello as a caricature of Orlando, who wishes to die for Rosalind's love; his teenage (I think?) brooding turns to murderous jealousy in Othello's hands. Yet we get the feeling from thinking of these two plays together that Cavell and Bloom together are right: had Othello responded to the suggestion with laughter, could tragedy have been avoided?

Returning to the essay, Cavell’s thesis, which I find very powerful, is that there can be no proof of another’s humanity, nor of the accidents of another’s humanity (faithfulness, etc.). Yet it is essential to believe, despite skepticism, in what is reasonable and likely in order not to fall into the depths of despair that plague Othello and Desdemona (and probably Descartes, too, had he not found his way out). One must take things in good faith, which emphasizes the evil of Iago: that he would take advantage of people who are trying to get through their lives without confronting that horrible skepticism that floats in the periphery of our consciousness.

Cavell does not, however, leave us without armor against the Iagos (Iagoes?) of the world. His advice – perhaps it’s not only his, but that which he dispenses – is to hold such skepticism at a distance, with Montaigne’s gay and sociable wisdom never far at hand. Above all, we must remember that what is tragic is in our hands, and that all events are equally fit for laughter as they are for grief. It is not a denial of what we know, but a yielding to what we know; it is a rejection of disbelief and an exaltation of belief. He concludes:

“So they are there, on their bridal and death sheets. A statue, a stone, is something whose existence is fundamentally open to the ocular proof. A human being is not. The two bodies lying together form an emblem of this fact, the truth of skepticism. What this man lacked [one could read instead 'what man lacks'] is not certainty. He knew everything, but he could not yield to what he knew, be commanded by it. He found out too much for his mind, not too little.”

Stray Observations

• Iago’s incredible opening speech: “You shall mark / Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave / That, doting on his own obsequious bondage, / Wears out his time, much like his master’s ass, / For nought but provender, and when he’s old, cashiered, / Whip me such honest knaves! Others there are / Who, trimmed in forms and visages of duty, / Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves, / And, throwing but shows of service on their lords, / Do well thrive by them, and when they have lined their coats, / Do themselves homage. These fellows have some soul [i.e., look out for themselves], / And such a one do I profess myself. For, sir, / It is as sure as you are Roderigo, / Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago. / In following him, I follow but myself. / Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, / But seeming so, for my peculiar end, / For when my outward action doth demonstrate / The native act and figure of my heart / In complement extern, ‘tis not long after / But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve / For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.”
• Duke: “When remedies are past, the griefs are ended / By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended. / To mourn a mischief that is past and gone / Is the next way to draw new mischief on. / What cannot be preserved when fortune takes, / Patience her injury a mock’ry makes. / The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief; / He robs himself that spends a bootless grief.” Brabantio answers: “But words are words. I never yet did hear / That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear.”
• Iago’s next incredible speech: “Virtue? a fig! ‘Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many – either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry – why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the beam of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost’rous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal strings or unbitted lusts; whereof I take this that you call love to be a set or scion.”
• Iago: “Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ.”
• Othello: “Now art thou my lieutenant.” Iago: “I am your own forever.”  I love this quote for the sheer creepiness with which it could be played.
• Othello: “Thou art on thy deathbed.” Desdemona: “Ay, but not yet to die.” A subtly powerful response. He informs her that she’s about to die, but she says that her death is approaching but far off. Her marriage bed she hopes will be her deathbed as well, so much she loves Othello.
• Finally, Othello’s last speech, which I also think is one of Shakespeare’s greatest pieces of poetry: “Soft you! a word or two before you go. / I have done the state some service, and they know’t. / No more of that. I pray you, in your letters, / When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, / Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, / Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak / Of one that loved not wisely, but too well; / Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, / Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes, / Albeit unused to the melting mood, / Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees / Their medicinal gum. Set you down this. / And say besides that in Aleppo once, / Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk / Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, / I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog / And smote him – thus.” Wilson Knight: “In that last scene, too, he utters the grandest of his poetry. The Iago-spirit never finally envelops him, masters him, disintegrates his soul.” As an aside, there's a short story by Nabokov, I believe, titled "In Aleppo Once..." I always thought the title was beautiful, "Aleppo" being a characteristically Nabokovian-sounding word, but I had forgotten that it was from Othello. 

Shakespeare, Hamlet

I have a tendency to champion the importance of the various books we cover here. Sometimes it’s helpful, as with the Islamic philosophers, whose influence I would argue is largely unheard of outside of philosophical circles. This is not the case with our book for today, and accordingly I would like to take an influence-agnostic approach to today’s post. Hamlet has more virtues as a work of art than most everything else, and I don’t think spending thousands of words stressing its place in literature is the best use of our time. We will discuss, then, the interesting aspects of the play and various critical responses to it, and we will casually slide past the fact that we are coming face to face with the most staggering, towering, masterful…er, nevermind.

The Question

I’ve heard that Hamlet is the most written about work of literature in the world, and I believe it. There is a sense that the desire to understand Hamlet the play is reflected in the desire to understand Hamlet the character. This is a relatively basic observation: the introduction notes the “ceaseless interrogation” in the play, not the least of which is the opening line, “Who’s there?” Similarly striking is the distinct lack of answers: the response to Bernardo’s opening question is not an identification, but a negative, “Nay.”

We encounter this proliferation of questions elsewhere. The famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy is a long string of questions and meditations without answers, even without a subject. Hamlet does not ask “Shall I be or not be?” Rather, he uses the infinitive. Moreover, the original question does not simply go unanswered but breeds more questions like ripples on the water. Which is unsurprising, given the metaphysical nature of the soliloquy. We’ve encountered before in Shakespeare the conflict between philosophy and daily life. Recall the supremely articulate but incredibly unhelpful speech the Duke gives to Claudio in Measure for Measure, which does nothing to allay his spiritual concerns: “Ay, but to die and go we know not where.” Philosophical comfort has its time and place, but for a man like Claudio, who does not have the intellectual mettle to absorb it, it is unhelpful; for Hamlet, who has intellectual mettle to spare, it is no comfort at all.

While Hamlet is asking these Big Questions, the rest of the cast are asking smaller ones, namely, What’s going on with Hamlet? Laertes and Polonius have an idea: he’s in love with Ophelia. They warn her of this, because she must know that “his will is not his own,” though this is true for more reasons than they think. He is the prince of Denmark, sure, but there is also the matter of the ghost of his father, whose existence only a handful of people are aware of, and whose reason for (non)being only Hamlet knows. This is another common point regarding the play: What the hell is Hamlet doing putting on his “antic disposition”? Of course, this is the point on which so many debates about the play hinge: it is unclear why Hamlet pretends to go mad. We can go into discussions in a moment, but we would do well to take the advice of the introduction: we must not “tame into knowledge” the “heart of [the play's] mysteries.” Perhaps the play does have answers, but I would find that difficult to believe when the answers that are provided are so flimsy, e.g., when Marcellus asks if the ghost didn’t bear some resemblance to the deceased king, Horatio answers, “As thou art to thyself,” which, knowing Shakespeare, isn’t as solid of an answer as Horatio might think.

Sickness Unto Death

Wilson Knight sees two madnesses in Hamlet: one feigned, the other sprung from contemned love. He does not discount the observations of the characters in the play who, unlike Hamlet, are men and women of the world, that is, the living world. Hamlet probably was rather mad from love. That love, he points out, “can recreate the sense of purpose, it inspires to heroism and action. And it is self-creative.” Love is the “supreme enemy… of neurotic despair.” This, it seems, is one of his madnesses, but it is not the only one, and it is not the solution to the riddle of Hamlet. Wilson Knight continues:

“Hamlet’s soul is sick…He can describe the glories of heaven and earth—but for him those glories are gone. And he knows not why. The disease is deeper than his loss of Ophelia, deeper than his mother’s sexual impurity and his father’s death. These are, like his mourning dress, the ‘trappings and the suits of woe.’ They are the outward symbols of it, the ‘causes’ of it: but the thing itself is ultimate, beyond causality… He does not avenge his father’s death, not because he dare not, not because he hates the thought of bloodshed, but because his ‘wit’s diseased’; his will is snapped and useless, like a broken leg.”

Hamlet is not the only victim of this disease. Elsinore and Denmark at large are suffering as well; “something’s rotten” etc, etc. And again, the cause is unclear. As an example, take the argument that the murder of King Hamlet has upset the balance. Has it? Wilson Knight points out that under Claudius’ leadership, “tact has found an easy settlement where arms and opposition might have wasted the strength of Denmark.” Claudius is, for all intents and purposes, a great king. We may be tempted to yearn for the bygone days when disputes were settled not with diplomacy but with “arms and opposition,” but we need only to remember Laertes foaming at the mouth, screaming that he’ll cut Hamlet’s throat in the church, to be reminded that force isn’t necessarily that appealing.

Whatever the cause, Hamlet is in pain, suffering from something we’d probably simplistically call depression:

“This goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’verhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me…”

In Shakespeare’s time, one might’ve said that Hamlet suffered from melancholy. If I were smart, I would’ve read Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in preparation for this post, but alas, I’m not. But there are still some things we can say. Some of those things are transcribed from a pretty, er, unique class I took on Hamlet, so I may start asserting very grand statements without any support.

What is the nature of Hamlet’s melancholy? We can say for now that it is a sort of detachment, which is suggested by his statement that “man delights not me.” He is detached from the world that Claudius and the rest of the castle are living, those who possess a "worldly elegance" that he does not. That worldly elegance is something philosophical, the ability to not take things too seriously, to not attach too closely to things, and thereby to achieve security and happiness. Hamlet, on the other hand, does not have such a philosophical detachment, but an emotional detachment, a loss of eros. Both are related to not caring about the world, yet one is happiness and the other is unhappiness. One is wholesome--that is, complete--and the other is incomplete, rotten, diseased: it is banal. Which was basically the point of the class I took: unhappiness is banal, just as evil is banal. (H/T to Hannah Arendt.) Why is it banal? Because it isn’t real: only the good is real.

Hamlet cannot accept the comfort of worldly philosophy, at least not at the beginning of the play, and certainly not from either Claudius or Gertrude. He has to learn it for himself. Which is not to say that the point of the play is self-knowledge, because such an observation seems sort of, well, banal.

Strike a Balance

To me, the most interesting aspect of the play is one that goes unnoticed, at least in common discussions. Hamlet is set at the threshold of a new era, a time when the surest certainties were eroding. We will go over two of these: the traditional conception of power and the traditional conception of religion.

Hamlet goes to school in Wittenberg, a detail that is mentioned once and immediately forgotten. What an odd choice, you might say, for a Danish prince to go to school in a random German town. Yet it is all but random: it is the town where Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church, inaugurating the Protestant Reformation, an event that has everything to do with Hamlet.

Religious uncertainty pervades the play. Hamlet struggles both with the philosophical implications of death and the religious implications. In his "to be or not to be," he mentions that death should be a land from which “no traveler returns,” yet just an act prior, the ghost returned.

Its return introduces a “terrible ambiguity,” as Northrop Frye puts it, the ambiguity of “life in death.” Rather than expand the world, the ghost’s presence “seals it in by surrounding us with an ‘afterlife’ that has no infinite presence in it.” Why not? Because death no longer seems an ending. The concerns of life are the same as the concerns of death. If the ghost were Catholic and in a Catholic afterlife, he would ask Hamlet to pray for him; instead, he merely perpetuates the cycle of worldly hatred. Moreover, Hamlet is tasked not only with killing Claudius, but with another, perhaps more terrifying duty: to remember his dead father, to remember a ghost. Whether or not Hamlet obeys the first decree well is up for discussion; yet he cannot but adhere to the second. In remembering the ghost—the ghost itself, not his father but “all the death of which it is a symbol,” as Wilson Knight writes—Hamlet’s world is altered: “the universe smells of mortality” to him.

The other surety losing its power is the old conception of power. King Hamlet, dressed even as a ghost in his armor, represents the might of brute force. Yet such power feels anachronistic in Claudius’ world of cool diplomacy. Despite being a murderer, Claudius is a pretty good king. His virtues, though, are not the old virtues; the “men” of the play are gone, those who possess active virtue, and have been replaced by those like Claudius, with Christian, feminized virtues. I am reminded of Cheryl Churchill’s play Cloud Nine, in which the patriarch is shot dead out of the blue at the end of the first half, symbolizing the death of the old way of life.

All this presents to Hamlet a very strange world, since he is caught in between everything. He is called to forget his father by his new “father”; he is also called to remember his father by his “old” father. He is melancholic but sees no way out, again, due to his father’s presence; yet he does not wish to participate in the farcical life lived by the rest of Elsinore. It is almost enough to drive someone mad.

A Tale of Two Brothers

And what about the ghost? Without even mentioning the gross religious overtones present in King Hamlet’s death (killed in a garden, killed by his brother), he claims that he is in a place where “the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away,” which sounds like purgatory, a Catholic idea, yet his request for Hamlet to kill Claudius doesn’t sound Catholic: it sounds Greek. Specifically, it sounds like something out of a classical tragedy; in fact, one might be inclined to agree with the introduction, which says that the ghost’s demand “has a frank simplicity, almost an ordinariness.” The notion of revenge for one’s father, even in our time, is not so ridiculous. Which is the great irony, that Hamlet is presented with a simple, an ordinary demand that he cannot fulfill.

This is not the only ordinary demand that Hamlet is unable to fulfill. Claudius is not only a masterful politician and a murderer, but a worldly man who enjoys giving advice. Take the advice he gives Laertes to motivate him to kill Hamlet sooner:

“Not that I think you did not love your father, / But that I know love is begun by time, / And that I see, in passages of proof, / time qualifies the spark and fire of it. / There lives within the very flame of love / A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it, / And nothing is at a like goodness still, / For goodness, growing to a pleurisy, / Dies in his own too-much. That we would do / We should do when we would, for this ‘would’ changes, / And hath abatements and delays as many / As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents, / And then this ‘should’ is like a spendthrift sign, / That hurts by easing.”

This is not only lovely poetry, but very reasonable advice. Despite how much Laertes loves Polonius—also a fan of giving advice, though not good advice—time heals wounds, and in this case, he needs to act before they do.

Compare this to his advice to Hamlet:

“'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, / To give these mourning duties to your father.  / But you must know your father lost a father, / That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound / In filial obligation for some term / To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever / In obstinate condolement is a course / Of impious stubbornness. 'Tis unmanly grief. / It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, / A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, / An understanding simple and unschooled. / For what we know must be and is as common / As any the most vulgar thing to sense, / Why should we in our peevish opposition / Take it to heart? Fie! 'Tis a fault to heaven, / A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, / To reason most absurd, whose common theme / Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried, / From the first corse till he that died today, / ‘This must be so.’”

There’s some interesting mirroring going on here. Claudius’ advice to both young men is related to the death of fathers, which makes sense, but his advice also emphasizes the relationship between human suffering and time. In Laertes’ case, he assures him that in the future his pain will cease, and therefore he should strike while the iron is hot. In Hamlet’s case, he argues that one should not mourn as much as Hamlet has because the death of fathers is the common theme throughout history, that is, throughout the past. In one case, Claudius looks forward, in the other, back. We should notice first that Claudius truly is wise. He is able to tailor his advice not only to the temperament of the advisee, but to the ends he hopes to achieve. He wants Hamlet to forget, for the death of King Hamlet to be remembered only in history books; he wants Laertes to remember, at least until the memory has served its purpose. In this way, the advice is like the ghost’s: when he asks Hamlet to remember him, perhaps Hamlet is taking it too literally. He does not need to remember forever his dead father, but only until the demand has been fulfilled. Perhaps it wasn’t Hamlet’s fault for taking him too literally: the ghost is not one for careful elaboration, preferring direct, “masculine” prose to Claudius’ flowery language.

"What Dreams May Come"

But no matter how good Claudius’ advice is, it suffers from a crucial limitation: it is advice for this world. Moreover, it is advice for a happy family, one that has not suffered from a murder, an “incestuous” marriage, and a son who cannot let any of it go. The nobility at Elsinore are not a happy family: they are, whether they know it or not, putting on an act. When Hamlet says he has that which passes show, he is not talking only about his clothes; he is talking about the show being put on by everyone around him. From Wilson Knight:

“This contrast [between Hamlet and Claudius] points the relative significance of the King and his court to Hamlet. They are of the world—with their crimes, their follies, their shallownesses, their pomp and glitter; they are of humanity, with all its failings, it is true, but yet of humanity. They assert the importance of human life, they believe in it, in themselves. Whereas Hamlet is inhuman, since he has seen through the tinsel of life and love, he believes in nothing, not even himself, except the memory of a ghost, and his black-robed presence is a reminder to everyone of the fact of death. There is no question but that Hamlet is right. The King’s smiles hide murder, his mother’s love for her new consort is unfaithfulness to Hamlet’s father, Ophelia has deserted Hamlet at the hour of his need. Hamlet’s philosophy may be inevitable, blameless, and irrefutable. But it is the negation of life. It is death.”

Harold Bloom said that Hamlet is the conduit through which supernal forces enter into the world, and this reflects that. Hamlet’s appearance invites the ghost into their realm: he is not the first to see it, but it is as if he allowed it to enter, the way a vampire cannot enter a home without being invited (think Let the Right One In, not Twilight). Without Hamlet’s presence, the world would continue on as it does, in its “common theme”: but because he drags the specter of death into the world of life, it cannot but come.

Moreover, Wilson Knight makes the excellent point that Hamlet is right. It is easy to dismiss the guy moping around in the corner when that’s all he’s doing. Hamlet is not simply moping; something is rotten, and he is very much aware. Yet the extent to which he is aware before the ghost explains everything is unclear. I prefer to agree that Hamlet is a conduit, the intermediary that must be present in order for the ghost to communicate effectively with the world. Wilson Knight writes that the ghost is “the devil of the knowledge of death,” and as such, Hamlet “has walked and held converse with death.” He continues:

“Hamlet is so powerful. He is, as it were, the channel of a mysterious force, a force which derives largely from his having seen through them all. In contact with him they know their own faults: neither they nor we should know them otherwise.” [Emphasis mine]

On Guard

I have focused on a lot of different aspects of the play and skipped over even more, but I want to add one final thing. In high school, when we finished the play, our teacher (Hi Ms. McEvoy!) gave us each a pen, which she asked us to bring to the AP English exam. On it was printed the phrase, “The readiness is all,” and she told us it was her favorite quote. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, and I didn’t until this reading of the play (which I believe is my fifth?)

How does Hamlet find the cure to his melancholy? It must be while he’s in the cemetery. Throughout the play, Hamlet—and Elsinore at large—has wavered between being and non-being, between life and death, action and inaction. The core of the “to be or not to be” speech is in the chiasmus: in life, one finds death all around; in death, life. To be or not to be? What is the difference? When the ghost appears, he has even less reason to see a distinction: there is death, walking around for all to see.

Yet in the cemetery, he sees the skull of Yorick and perhaps because of this remembers something of the finality of death. After all, it is there that he wrestles with Laertes, and he is the one to make the first move. Holding the skull of a man he once loved might tell him something about death, namely, that it is not life.

And what is life? This remains unclear, but we don’t need it to be clear. From the man himself:

“Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.”

It is readiness. At the end of the play, Hamlet returns to Wittenberg, to the protestant notion of predestination which seems to be the only cure to his woes. Hamlet, who is so full of accidents and contingencies, finds peace in the idea that he need only be prepared. I’m not sure how correct this reading of the ending is. It may be too simple, and it may even be wrong. But I like it, and it makes me wish I still had Mrs. McEvoy’s pen. The readiness is all.

Stray Observations

• Hamlet: “’Tis very strange.” Horatio: “As I do live, my honored lord, ‘tis true.”
• Ophelia: “Now see that noble and most sovereign reason / Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh, / That unmatched form and feature of blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me / T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see.” That last line is great.
• Hamlet to Gertrude: “Good night – but go not to my uncle’s bed. / Assume a virtue, if you have it not. / that monster custom, who all sense doth eat / Of habits evil, is angel yet in this, / That to the use of actions fair and good / He likewise gives a frock or livery / That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight, / And that shall lend a kind of easiness / To the next abstinence; the next more easy; / For use almost can change the stamp of nature, / And either lodge the devil, or throw him out / With wondrous potency.”
• You may have noticed that I only quoted Harold Bloom once this time. I began reading his essay on Hamlet, but the first, like, 10 pages were just an extended circle-jerk about its importance and greatness; hence my remark at the beginning. I like the guy, even though I recognize that he's pretty eccentric in his criticism, but man, we get it, it's a great play, shut up.